What I learned.

I've spent the last week in a bedroom hiding away from my family with COVID. I'm the one with covid. Not them. Which is why I was hiding away. It's not that complicated, is it?

Anyway. At first I thought I'd use this time for something productive. In hindsight I'm not sure if I let myself off immediately from this. I thought of the cartoon of the bloke in a rowboat in a raging sea and how he's thinking to himself that he should use this time wisely. And I obviously thought of fucking Shakespeare and his fucking plague and his fucking writing hamlet. The prick. 

But then I realised that was his job. He just worked from home. He wrote plays all day every day. This was no different. For me, it was a massive shift from my daily routine, which I was now trying to use as some sort of creative retreat. Cue the bloke in the rowboat. 

But, eventually, I did use the time. And I learnt, or relearnt, a few things about myself and my creative process. 

1. Writing an outline is very hard, especially when you try to use Tom hanks "blowing through an 11 page treatment" of that thing you do "in a week". Was it even a week? Anyway. He clearly had a clear idea clearly in his clear head about that film and the treatment was just getting it on paper for someone else to read. Me, my treatments are more like a screaming brainstorm as I try to get the idea to stand up straight. The only way out of that situation is to type and try and work it out. Pick out the bits you can see and try to link them up. Colour around and outside the lines until the inside is clear. I went from an idea full of holes to a structure that allowed me to pour lampshades into the holes. Which is good enough for me. 

2. You can't write without the outline or the treatment. Or at least you can't get very far. Having a rough set of words to follow when tapping it into a script allows you to speed ahead and not get caught up in not knowing. 

3. You need an ending first. It might change later on, but you need an ending that feels good enough to work towards.

So. What would I take from this going forward? The lack of fear. The outline, the document of nonsense, is key. You start with that. Trying to pants a screenplay is insane and self defeating. Trying to pants an outline is how an outline should be written. I had a series of beats for the start of the story and then realised they were impossible to write unless I had the latter half sorted out already to some degree. So I wrote the latter half. And once that was done it was a lot easier to slot the start on. And now the start is done I can go through and fill in the holes, add little callbacks, link things up. 

What would I do for my next script? I'm excited. Because the biggest barrier has always been not having any fucking scripts. And now I feel I've figured out ho to write them. I feel like I can churn them out now, as long as I have the outline and the ending. And the fear of doing the outline ... well. I guess we'll see how that goes. I'm not sure how I got over the fear of the outline this time. I think I just wrote my fears of the holes in the story and eventually a coherent piece appeared from all the crap. I specifically remember typing a lot of freaked out shit about having no clear idea what I was doing and how much pressure I was putting on my self over it, until suddenly it was there. I think breaking things down into manageable beats, and then even more manageable beats, if it's not manageable, make it even smaller, over and over, until you can handle it. 

So. Let's try this with our next thing. It's going to be the phantom manor. We're going to make an outline. Break the bits down until we can handle them. We have the opening, with the handshake deal. And we have the Marie Celeste house scene. And we have Ethel skeletons coming out of the soil. And we have dad getting sucked into the Earth. And meeting the other kid. And then they go to the house for some reason. Something leads them there. Who tells them about it? I guess they know. Maybe they dig a hole to try find dad. Anyway. The ending. He reveals he sacrificed himself for his children unlike his idiot parents and this sacrifice is more than the phantom can handle (because he made a deal with the oil Earth to save himself but end we up sacrificing his own family) which breaks the curse. A nice logical ending. No boys, it was meant to be this way. And do they get him back? Maybe. Who knows. So I've got the beginning and the end and the dad is a fun buffoon character who actually has a heart of gold and love for his child. That's beginning and end and a tiny bit of the middle. So we're off. Let's fill that middle in.  

Oh I forgot the one other thing I learned. I learned I actually do like this. I like the act of writing. I like it. It's fun. What I don't like is hesitating and staring at the blank page. So as long as I fill it up, I think we're good. Get that outline, get that ending. 

I should clarify that the outline starts off like a professional log line kind of synopsis and then devolves into snatches of dialogue or whole scenes and random question marks and other nonsense. It's bits to be stitched together later.